Naomi Watts will join Viggo Mortensen for the London-based thriller Eastern Promises. David Cronenberg will direct the script by Steven Knight, which delves into the same seedy underside of London life that Knight explored in Dirty Pretty Things. Watts will play a midwife at a London hospital who gets dragged into the criminal underworld when she tries to discover the identity of a dead patient. The movie will begin filming in November.

BOSTON -- Monkey business rules in Kong's Night Out, a rowdy new farce from Lowell's own Jack Neary, which premiered at Lyric Stage Company on Wednesday.

The monkey, of course, is monster primate King Kong. The hairy beast has gone ape for blonde bombshell Ann Darrow, slipped out of his chains and stormed Manhattan. If you think this clever play sounds vaguely like the classic 1930s flick King Kong, you're right.

Neary's taken that premise and given it a back story, inventively imagining what might have happened in the suite at that hotel, on which the furiously fuming Kong descends as he pursues Ann. [More]

Two New Zealand films have been ranked among the top 10 wordwide in terms of 2005 box office revenue. In its annual report on world film market trends released this week Cannes European Cinema ranked The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe seventh and King Kong eighth. Narnia made US$428 ($695) million and King Kong US$388 ($630) million, despite being released only in December. [More]

James writes: In video blog 8 of the new movie Hot Fuzz, written and directed and starring the same kick arse team from Shaun Of The Dead, director Edgar Wright feels tired and runs down, so who does he call for help?! Peter Jackson! Ala the Kong and Superman production diaries! Though the phone prove useless as Pete walks into frame! Behold! [More]

New Zealand-based Skymatter announced that its 3D modeling software Mudbox is now available for public beta. Mudbox, which was used in beta form on films like King Kong, is a 3D sculpting, detailing, and design tool developed by a number of vfx and game industry experts. It's a standalone application that is currently in its first beta, and the development team is already promising several planned features and improvements to follow its release. [More]

“Show me the monkey” is bound to be a demand of any audience confronted with an entertainment that riffs on King Kong. On that score, the screwball farce Kong’s Night Out, in its world premiere at Lyric Stage Company of Boston (through June 3), delivers handily. (That’s a pun.) But it takes the comedy a while to get there, much of it filled with plotting, panic, and slamming doors. Massachusetts playwright Jack Neary has been working on the script, more a homage to 1930s stage comedy than to the original King Kong, for five years, most recently in connection with the Lyric’s new-play development program, Growing Voices. In its debut, some of the work — which imagines the action in the hotel suite from which Fay Wray’s character is snatched the night Kong breaks his chains and follows his heart — is funny, and all of it is sillier than the Teletubbies on helium. The cast, however, is on speed — even when the farce flounces or flounders. [More]

Whoever did it didn’t bother leaving a ransom note or any clues behind. They just cut the chain link that wound through the three gorillas’ arms, resting on knuckles, and took them Saturday night. The next morning, when Zoe Triantafillou got to her family’s King Kong restaurant near Interstate 80 there was no trace of the concrete gorillas that are fixtures outside. “It was a very planned prank, if that’s what it was,” she said Monday. [More]

HALF MOON BAY — Moving King Kong is a delicate operation. On Thursday morning, three men stand in the parking lot of Fabbri Statuary, trying to maneuver the 10-foot-tall steel gorilla sculpture on to a forklift that seems small by comparison. The animal's generous hindquarters make him unwieldy as he wobbles toward his new home, where he will hulk over unsuspecting motorists on Highway 92. It's a typical day's work for Gilbert, Kong's mysterious creator, who drove the gorilla up from his studio in Southern California and helped install him with his new friends: a 12-foot-tall Tyrannosaurus rex, a velociraptor, a brontosaurus, a triceratops and several other dinosaurs Gilbert constructed. They stand as if ready to spring in attack, mouths open in mid-roar. [More]

UNITED NATIONS May 15, 2006 (AP)— Naomi Watts has been named a special representative to the U.N. program for HIV/AIDS. The "King Kong" actress just returned from a trip to Zambia, where she saw hospitals, homes and schools where lives have been destroyed by AIDS. "Given these stark realities, I can no longer stand on the sidelines," Watts told a news conference Monday. "I want to use this position as a way to spread the word, to tell people what I saw." [More]